stop the presses. There is a tool at hand. first, there are ways
to simulate the users experience right there in your browser.
turn off all the visual effects and load the pag. what do you
get? Before I get chastised for not taking those who need visual
effects into account, With visual effects turned on, change the
resolution of your monitor to something lower than that beautiful
high res you usually have it set to if you do and load the page
with all the bells and whistles. Ask your self some questions.
How long does it take the page to load at t1 speeds which is what
some designers have and then multiply the load time by 10 and ask
your self if you'd want to wait that long?
Now to the tools. there is on the web a smattering of simulations
of lynx and webtv. treat yourself to that experience. You can
also get demo copies of all the assistive technology programs that
are available out there if you like and try them out but I'd
caution that unless you have a lot of time or are willing to spend
a lot of time with me holding your hand this may not be as
fruitful as it could be. How does your page look in 3x browsers?
get lynx for free and pop it on your unix, win 9x or nt machine
and even windows millennium or 2,000 I think and check the pages
with it just to get the flavour. I appreciate all the efforts and
the questions and what kinds of examples are looked for but there
needs to be a basic real time understanding of the issues.
Perhaps there need to be some slick slides developped to walk
someone through this experience. Another way to approach
designers is to equate their experiences with sites that are
unfathomable to them with sites that pwds have problems with. I
have found for the most part that if a site is developped using
good approaches including informative ilustrations with
appropriate text labels that all benefit.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Quinn" <anthony@frontend.com>
To: <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, January 19, 2001 5:21 AM
Subject: RE: Accessible _By_
Hi folks,
I also agree that relating the problems of accessibility to the
needs of
real people is a good thing. While I believe that validators like
Bobby, or
tools like A-prompt are useful and there is no doubt that they
contribute to
an overall improvement in accessibility, it would be great if
there was a
tool which could simulate the user experience caused by
accessibility
problems.
Developers and designers are a key audience and the tools that
exist at the
moment are pitched at this audience in so far as they show someone
how to
fix or avoid accessibility problems at a HTML level. However,
before a
designer can effectively solve a usability problem, they have to
have some
insight into what the problem feels like from a user's point of
view.
The same applies for "influencers", or people who run and
commission web
projects. These people are the ones who provide direction and
make
accessibility, or usability a priority for design teams. They know
nothing
about HTML and are not usually interested in learning.
To my knowledge, there is no "tool" which can emulate the user
experience
and ground the problem in terms that people can understand and
relate to but
I could be wrong. Does anyone know of such a thing?
Anthony
-----Original Message-----
From: Kynn Bartlett [mailto:kynn-edapta@idyllmtn.com]
Sent: 19 January 2001 05:29
To: Charles F. Munat; w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: Accessible _By_
At 5:10 PM -0800 1/18/01, Charles F. Munat wrote:
>I agree that relating any kind of injustice to real people
instead of to
>abstract ideals is a better idea. But just to reiterate - as Kynn
>acknowledges - that was not what I was referring to.
Agreed, I didn't have any dispute with anything Charles said, I
was
just using his phrasing to spark my own tangent on an unrelated
topic.
--Kynn
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/